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8 Responses to “Plastic Sargasso”

I am a bit reminded of “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”.

When studying zoology at Greifswald, I was also attending a few classes of marine ecology. One day, we had a guest lecturer from the rostock oceanographic institute who had conducted research on the biocoenosis of the Mediterranean deep sea floor. He had been on a research vessel there and taken a few samples, which means a dredger bucket is lowered for a few 1,000 metres onto the sea floor where it fills with sediments and its critters, to be pulled up again and investigated.
The whole process for one sample took 48 hours – that’s two full days without sleep – and had cost more than 100,000 Euros, each!
He had this exciting slide show of the process and had built up suspense brilliantly to what was in the first bucket from the deep sea, what fabulous critters, and alien species we’d now see, and then the great finale, the first slide of the bucket’s content:

Bits of polystyrene – nothing but bits of polystyrene. not even some muck – just plastics.